Mestizo: A Novel (Jewish Latin America)

First published in Argentina in 1994, this ingenious novel is a detective story in which the police try to solve an assassination and a lost man tries to reconstruct his identity. These two searches are set against the story of four generations of a Jewish family, a social and cultural narrative that spans nearly a hundred years of cataclysmic events of the century including World War I, the Russian and Cuban revolutions, the birth of the state of Israel, and the military dictatorship in Argentina.

Identity�personal, cultural, historical�is the main theme of this novel, as is the experience of being �other.� Rejection is represented in many forms, including that of being a Jew surrounded by anti-Semitic gentiles and that of being a progressive Jew among the Orthodox. As the characters find ways to eliminate discrimination, it becomes clear there is no unblended race or religion, and that to be a mestizo, a person of mixed culture and blood, is to reject the concept of purity and homogeneity.